MultiMarkdown 3.0b11 Released

MultiMarkdown 3.0b11 is available — this is a major update. Please read
the list of changes below, as it may impact your work flow — particularly
images.

Image dimensions in “real” units work in HTML(e.g. “2.5in”)

![This is a **caption**][image] will now generate a visible caption in
HTML using the <figure> and <figcaption> elements available in HTML5
Note: This may break some other tools that are not HTML5 compatible -
e.g. Tidy. It should work in all modern browsers — remember that Internet
Explorer is never a modern browser, so no promises there. The
compatibility option defaults to the older behavior so that should help,
but will limit which other features work.

The image “alt text” (as in previous example) is used as the caption now
across all formats. Previously the title was used. This allows you to use
MMD markup in the caption itself. This is a change in behavior from previous
versions, but will ultimately be much more powerful.

HTML output now defaults to DOCTYPE html and is compatible with HTML5.
XSLT still works, since the output is also valid XML. With the exception of
duplicated id attributes (from reusing an image, or a header for example),
the HTML5 generated should be valid.

If you include MMD markup in your image “alt text”, it will be stripped
before being applied to the alt tag to avoid generating invalid HTML.

There is now a difference between “inline” images and “figures” — inline
images do not have a caption, so they should be less disruptive, and should
work properly in LaTeX and ODF.

All appropriate image dimension units (e.g. in, px, %, etc.) should work
across all output formats. There is an issue with ODF and using % for both
width and height, however, that requires you to manually adjust the image to
match the guidelines - it’s easy, but can’t be automated for the moment. If
anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know.

Image dimensions and table alignment are now handled using the CSS style
attribute for HTML5 compatibility. This required a change to the XSLT
matching algorithm, but should be working properly.

Despite all the changes, for most users there really shouldn’t be much
difference from your expectations, with the exception of how you specify the
caption for an image. This is different, and will require you to alter your
documents. But it should be more consistent with the table syntax, for
example, and more powerful in the long run.

Thanks to everyone who contributed feedback for this version — even when I
don’t immediately implement a change you suggest, I usually do think about it
for quite a while and try to come up with something.

I’ll give this release a few days to gather feedback and look for bugs. I
think that I have now implemented all the features on my to do list. The next
release will likely be 3.0 release candidate 1. I don’t anticipate any further
major changes, barring unforeseen circumstances.

For everyone who has mentioned wanting to “give back” — now would be a great
time to start helping me fix up the wiki. It’s a mess and I would like to
get it tuned up in time for the release of the 3.0 code/binary.

Furthermore, I have been considering what should happen to the MMD 2.0 (perl)
codebase. I am probably not going to maintain it moving forward — it’s going
to require a lot of work to make the perl version compatible with the MMD 3.0
syntax, and it’s unlikely that I will ever need it (which dampens my
enthusiasm for working on it quite a bit!). I would rather devote my time
towards an iOS compatible version of MMD, and possibly and iPhone/iPad app.
Instead, I would like to open up the github repo to a few interested
collaborators who would be interested in maintaining the MMD Perl codebase. I
would certainly help answer questions and offer support periodically, but I
don’t anticipate doing much work on it myself in terms of actual perl coding.
If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to let me know!